[Douglas Spotted eagle]

The *correct* way to manage exposure (prior to any color correction) is to use the Levels filter in conjunction with the Waveform monitor set to Luma vs Chroma. Essentially the steps are these:
1-make clip black/whte
2-open Waveform monitor. Set to Studio RGB
3-Insert Levels filter
4-Use levels filter to bring up highlights or bring down blacks or both. Highest point should just kiss 100 on the scale and darkest should just touch or be slightly above 7.5 on the scale. Toggle back and forth with the B/W filter that you inserted in step 1.

Glenn Chan and I cover this extensively in the Color Correction for Vegas DVD.
If you use the Color Curves filter as your first option, you’re likely kicking up noise where you don’t need to. You’re also shifting the saturation of the middle ranges where you likely don’t want to.

Douglas Spotted Eagle
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[Douglas Spotted eagle]

Another common/major difference is studio RGB vs computer RGB (Vegas terms).

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[Douglas Spotted eagle]

If I understand your post correctly, you’re working with MPEG video, is the audio AC3, MPEG, or PCM? If it’s MPEG, you’ll likely lose sync.
By “slowed down” do you mean pitched down? If so, that’s a sample problem. If it’s different in length, that could be a sample problem as well.
Project settings to 48K? Sound card capable of 48K?
Have you rendered even a small portion of this project to determine if it’s only playback that is latent vs actual latency? RAM render it (SHIFT +B) and see if that gives you sync’d audio.

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[Douglas Spotted eagle]

if your display or player doesn’t support widescreen, then you’re going to see either letterboxing or squeezed content. Does your display support wide?
Project settings to wide?
Render settings to wide?
Display set to display wide?
Is the source content wide?
There are several variables that could be responsible for why you’re not seeing wide display without letter boxing. Are you seeing pillarboxes too (vertical black lines on right/left)?

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[Douglas Spotted eagle]

You can use a computer monitor as a secondary monitor; simply connect it as such and divide Vegas to each monitor. Docking windows make this easy.
However, you’ll find yourself scaling the preview in the second monitor. Vegas 6, and especially Vegas 7 are optimized for dual screen systems.
Don’t forget to calibrate that LCD monitor if you’re using it for C/C.

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[Douglas Spotted eagle]

Dunno Lance….it doesn’t get much more “pro” than what you’re doing. 🙂
Thanks for the kind words, and hope to see you sometime soon.

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[Douglas Spotted eagle]

As far as multiple generation renders, DV should look just fine,

*all* compressed formats degrade over generational renders. Regardless of how compressed or lesser compressed they may be.

Rendering to DV prior to rendering to MPEG is a bad idea if quality and color depth are important to you. Not only are you gaining a generation, but you are also halving your color.
DV is 4:1:1. MPEG is 4:2:0
If you have a timeline with graphics, titles, etc, plus compositing, those are all processed internally at 4:4:4. When your render to MPEG from the timeline, those 4:4:4 segments become 4:2:0 and you lose very little in the visual perception. When you render to 4:1:1 (DV) as an intermediary, you’ve reduced the information by 75%. Then you halve part of that information again when you render to 4:2:0 (MPEG) from the DV/avi file, thus effectively giving you a 4:1:0 MPEG, meaning you’ve lost color depth and some softening is inevitable.
As Mike K suggests, render to MPEG straight from the Vegas timeline. Not only do you have significantly more control, but you also generate a better MPEG at the end of the process. And, it’s faster.
Project settings for DV-acquired media should be the NTSC DV (assuming you’re in the USA/Canada) template, or NTSC DV Widescreen if you’re using a widescreen cam. If you’re shooting HDV, then you should be using the HDV 60i template, or the HDV 23.976 template if you used a Canon or Sony 24p camcorder set to 24p mode.
HTH

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[Douglas Spotted eagle]

Because DV is a non-square pixel aspect ratio. Photoshop only works in square pixels, so by working with square pixels imported to a non-square format, the pixels will elongate correctly with this size.
Frankly, I rarely worry about it unless I’m dealing with titles or images that I absolutely can’t use Pan/Crop with.

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[Douglas Spotted eagle]

What codec are the files? Quicktime is a wrapper, it can contain many codecs. If you’re not sure, use Gspot to check the file.
Where were the Quicktime files created/generated?

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[Douglas Spotted eagle]

thank you, Rick. It’s nice to be back, hope to spend a little more time around here.
The community is what it is, because people make it so. I’m glad to be a part of it all.

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